Lets get the worst thing about these new CPUs out of the way before talking about some of their new features and performance enhancements- these new CPUs bring a new socket with them. This is a bit of a shame as this will be the fourth socket for Intel CPUs in the last few years. We saw the move from LGA 775 found in Core 2 Duo CPUs to LGA 1366 with the introduction of the Core i7 extreme in 2008 which was followed by the mainstream Core i3, i5 and i7 CPUs with the LGA 1156 socket in 2009. What this means is that you will need a new motherboard if you plan on upgrading to the new Core CPU which has an LGA 1155 socket. With that out of the way, here is what these new Sandy Bridge CPU’s architecture look like